Garrison Keillor | Trump, Ventura & political performance art

Twitter was made for this man. More than 140 characters and his mind wanders. Short sentences are his medium. People are tired of stupidity. Foreigners are pouring across the border. We’ll build a wall. It’ll be beautiful. ISIL was created by Hillary Clinton. Let’s take over Saudi Arabia. You’ve got to be strong. And smart. China is robbing us blind. The press is unfair.

Racism? Sexism? Whatever. The guy is a cartoon, campaigning in captions. He is a very rich man who is lucky that his father was born before he was and, like so many fortunate sons, he is long on confidence, short on social skills.

Here in Minnesota in 1998, we elected a cartoon candidate, the rassling villain with the shaved skull and the pink boa, Jesse (The Body) Ventura, who squeezed past two standard-issue candidates to sneak into the governor’s office with a 37% plurality. He hung in for four years, fulminated, blustered, and in the end did not seem to be enjoying himself. Meanwhile the sky stayed up where it should be, perhaps because the governor of Minnesota doesn’t command a few thousand nuclear warheads.